“Michael Jardine died as he had lived –
a brave and honest man.” These words were spoken by his colleague,
Detective Sergeant Jackie Reid, at Jardine’s funeral. I would have also
said that he was an honourable man.

According to the plaque on his
gravestone, Michael Jardine was born in 1961.

Taggart fans first met him in 1987, as a lowly
Detective Constable, in the Taggart episode The Killing
Philosophy, and watched him move up the ranks to become a Detective
Chief Inspector. His father was dead, but, at that time his mother was
still living. In a conversation with Taggart, he mentioned his brothers
but we were not told how many brothers he had.

Michael’s father had been a police
sergeant and a friend of Jim Taggart, and Michael had chosen to follow in
his footsteps because they ‘seemed to fit.’ When Taggart’s partner, DS
Peter Livingstone returned from his holidays to find that Michael was part
of the team, his displeasure was evident. While Taggart and Livingstone
were from different worlds, and had never really ‘gelled,’ the newcomer
was from the same background as his superior, and Taggart commented that
he used to bounce Mike on his knee. Obviously jealous of Taggart’s
partiality for Michael, Livingstone made the most of every opportunity to
give the newcomer a hard time. He appeared to take distinct pleasure in
Michael’s mortification when, during stakeout, he left the obviously
homophobic young copper alone in a gay bar.

Livingstone moved on and Michael,
promoted to Detective Sergeant, replaced him as Taggart’s ‘neighbour.’
However, when Livingstone returned for a brief visit some years later, it
was obvious that the dislike was mutual and had not diminished, and
neither man lost any opportunity to snipe at the other.

Michael’s father had been an alcoholic,
and, after watching him ruin his life and career through drink, Michael
had chosen to become be a teetotaller. When he revealed this to his boss,
Taggart’s dismay was compounded by the additional the information that his
young sidekick was also a practicing Christian. Though Taggart wasted no
opportunity to make fun of Michael’s beliefs, he was (for him) amazingly
tolerant of them. However, there were times when Michael’s slightly self
righteous attitude, and his attempts to lecture Taggart on his eating and
drinking habits, became more than the man could bear. In spite of their
differences, the two men got along well, and, after Taggart’s death, his
widow revealed to Michael that Taggart had thought of him as the son he
could never have.

It was not always possible for Michael to reconcile the
harshness of his job with his Christian beliefs, and as he moved up
through the ranks, and there were times when he spoke or acted in a
distinctly UnChristian manner. There were also several occasions when his
naivety and compassion led him into trouble, such as when he was accused
of rape by a woman whom he had tried to help and who had been hypnotised
into believing that he had raped her.

After one disastrous bout in the witness
box, when his beliefs were held up as evidence that he had persecuted a
suspect, he was described in the press as puritanical and prudish. On
another occasion, Jackie Reid described him as rigid and hierarchical, and
even starchy Superintendent McVitie ordered him to “unbutton it a little”
when his strait-laced attitude threatened the progress of a murder
investigation within the gay community. His homophobic attitude was
severely challenged when he discovered that DC Stuart Fraser was not only
homosexual, but that he had had a relationship with one of the suspects in
the case.

Shortly after he was promoted to DCI,
Michael began showing the signs of stress. In a moment of frustration,
when forced to attend a seminar instead of attending to what he considered
the more important task of apprehending criminals, he commented to DC
Stuart Fraser that the higher you climbed up the ladder, the more you lost
track of the things that had made you want to do the job in the first
place. He began to experience chest pains, and was diagnosed with angina.

Throughout his career, Michael had
always striven to do what he considered the right thing; aside from a few
lapses of judgement, he had always been pretty much a 'by-the-book' man.
He was often exasperated by DI Robbie Ross, whose methods were
questionable, to say the least. However, with Ross, as with DC Fraser, he
did not allow his prejudice to interfere with the way he carried out his
job, and eventually he came to respect both men, and in turn to be
respected by them. His attitude to his subordinates was best summed up by
Jackie Reid, in the episode Death Trap, when she commented to
Fraser, “Michael Jardine would walk over glass for you!”

Michael’s relationship with Jackie Reid
was enigmatic. They met when Jackie joined the team when she was a DC and
Michael was a DS and had been close friends ever since. There were
occasional hints that the relationship might be taken further, but neither
Michael nor Jackie ever made a move. On one occasion, when another officer
made lewd comments about Jackie and vulgar inferences about their
relationship, Michael punched him so hard he fell off his chair. It is
indicative of his honourable nature that when reprimanded by McVitie,
Michael refused to give an explanation for his actions.

On Michael’s part, the reluctance to
take their relationship further might have been due to the fact that
Jackie was a co-worker and his subordinate, or that he did not want to
risk their friendship by making a play for her.

DI Ross, however, held no such scruples,
and, when he made advances to Jackie, a quiet rivalry seemed to develop
between the two men. When Jackie married Brian Holmes, Michael was
genuinely happy for her, but his happiness seemed tempered by a hint of
wistfulness.

(Comment: In one interview, James
Macpherson, who played the role of Michael Jardine, commented that he felt
that Michael did not really want Jackie, but he did not want anyone else
to have her…)

A tee toller and
non-smoker, women seemed to be Jardine’s only vice – usually with
disastrous results for him. Jardine was phenomenally unlucky,
romantically. From his first appearances as Jim Taggart's sidekick, he
seemed to be notoriously bad at choosing his romantic partners. If not
involved in the crime as either victim or perpetrator, the women
eventually let him down in other ways. Only two women seemed to be as
loyal and caring as he. Jackie Reid and WPC Heather McIntyre, with whom he
seemed to be about to start a relationship, shortly before his death. At
first, Michael seemed reluctant to initiate a relationship with Heather,
possibly for some very good reasons – he was her superior, and he had been
badly ‘burned’ by women several times in the past. However, with a little
‘nudge’ from DI Ross (or perhaps in spite of his interference) the pair
finally seemed to be getting it together …

Michael had always been loyal to both
his superiors and to his subordinates, and assumed that this loyalty would
be returned. When he was removed from a murder investigation for political
reasons, at the request of an old enemy, and relegated to checking files,
he was furious. Disillusioned by the lack of support from his superiors and convinced
that his replacement, DCI Burke, was leading the investigation in the
wrong direction, he decided to follow his own line of inquiry. Warned by
Reid that he should wait before taking any action that could ruin his
career, he commented, bitterly, that he had been waiting all his career,
and “look where it got me!” His actions brought him into conflict with
Burke, and with his superior, Detective Superintendent Val Patterson, and
put him on a path that lead first to suspension and then to his death. One
of the very few times he went against the establishment, he paid with his
life.